1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system designed to save labor for operation/management of equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Protocols for connecting equipment in a building to a network and allowing a central system to monitor them have already been widely used (ex. BACnet, ANSI/ASHRAE standard 135-2004).
With the recent advances in equipment network technology, much attention has been paid to equipment cooperating operation by general users using a network. Assume that a user is to make a presentation in a facilities utilization room. In this case, if equipment is not networked, the user manually performs a series of operations of rolling down a screen in the facilities utilization room, dimming the lighting on the screen side, rolling down a blind, activating an AV system, and turning on a projector. In contrast, assume that the user sets a desired state in advance by using a networked equipment system. In this case, by simply notifying via the network that the user wants to make “presentation”, he/she can easily perform equipment cooperating operation described above by using the network.
Setting methods for equipment cooperating operation in a small system in which an equipment manager and a user can be regarded as the same person, like a home network, include, for example, a method of setting an execution rule for equipment cooperating control in a controller as disclosed in patent reference 1 (JP-A 2005-130423(KOKAI)) and a method of making a controller store, as a macro, setting change notification responses from equipment each having a setting change notification mode as disclosed in patent reference 2 (JP-A 2004-206494 (KOKAI)).
However, a building has several thousand to several hundred thousand pieces of equipment, and includes many equipment sets as cooperation targets. In general, a building has different management domains for the management of an equipment network and an information network used for operation by each tenant.
In contrast, setting attribute information about equipment types and floors in equipment on the equipment system side makes it possible to form a system which prepares a window which allows general users to make searches with the attribute information. However, each user manually generates an equipment set, which is cumbersome and difficult.
As describe above, in order to implement flexible cooperating operation of equipment, a general user of a building needs to select cooperating operation targets (=second equipment set) from an equipment population (=first equipment set) permitted from an equipment system and set setting values (=operation set) for the respective equipment of the equipment set. This imposes a heavy load on the user.